Call to let the people decide new place names on Mercury and Pluto 20 April 2015, by Alice Gorman
choose the new place-names.
Mapping our celestial neighbours
How do places in the solar system get named? We already use the names of gods and goddesses given by the Romans, over 2,000 years ago, to the most visible planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
The existence of Pluto, Uranus and Neptune wasn't known until much later; but they were similarly Artist’s impression of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft named after classical deities. encountering Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. Credit: NASA/Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Planetary geography really kicked off with the Institute invention of telescopes in the 17th century. Celestial places were being mapped by European astronomers at the same time as places on the Earth, in the era of European colonial expansion. Do you think a place on Pluto should be named after the sinister tentacle-faced monster Cthulhu The lunar maria ("seas"), mountains and craters from the novels of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft? Or familiar to us today were mapped by the first real a crater on Mercury after iconic opera singer Dame selenographer (charter of the moon), the Dutch Nellie Melba? astronomer Michael van Langren, in 1645. (Incidentally, he also made the first known Mercury and Pluto are at the opposite ends of the statistical graph). solar system, but this year, as a result of two extraordinary space missions, some of their newly His place names were mostly European royalty and observed topographical features will receive notable scientists of the time. These included names. French queen Anne of Austria, now more famous as a character in The Three Musketeers, and the Four years ago, NASA's Messenger spacecraft Jesuit mathematician Jean Leurechon, who, among slipped into orbit around Mercury, the planet other achievements, wrote the earliest known closest to the sun. It's still there, but only just –- description of how the ear trumpet works. operating on a whisper of fuel, it's predicted to fall to the surface on April 30. Twenty years later in 1665, Giovanni Cassini observed Jupiter's giant red storm. He called it the Around five billion kilometres away, the New rather prosaic "Permanent Spot", to distinguish it Horizons spacecraft is in its final approach to Pluto. from the shadows cast by the orbiting moons on the In July 2015, we'll be able to see the surface of this surface. controversial dwarf planet, discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh. Some of the earliest names on Mars were given to light and dark markings (albedo features) by For both planets, crowd-sourcing is being used to English astronomer Richard Proctor in 1867.
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The names he chose were astronomers involved in committee. Mars observation, such as the Reverend William Dawes, on whose map he based his own. He was a With the modern era of space exploration from the bit over-enthusiastic, though, and re-used the same 1950s, satellites and space probes gave us new names in different features – hence the Reverend eyes to see details never before visible. The IAU Dawes was immortalised not once but six times, as had to step up its activities. In 1958 they an ocean, continent, sea, strait, island and bay. rationalised Martian place names, in favour of Schiaparelli's system rather than Proctor's. The colour-blind astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli made a detailed Martian map when the planet was Task groups were set up to handle Mercury, Venus in opposition in 1877: he stuck with the classical and the Outer Planets as more deep space probes tradition, using names such as Elysium, Tharsis explored the solar system. and Zephyria. The IAU's principles state that names should: In 1934, Eugene Antoniadi's map of Mercury similarly drew on classical antiquity, with an albedo Be clear, simple and unambiguous to feature named after the esoteric sage Hermes facilitate scientific communication Trismegistus, and another after the Roman Avoid duplication Emperor Hadrian's solar-heated Heliocaminus Avoid political, military or religious baths. significance Promote diversity.
The IAU has a list of preferred sources, including well-known collections of myths and legends from around the world. Scientists and the general public can also suggest names or themes. But there is no obligation for the various task groups to accept these suggestions.
Crowd-sourcing the solar system
This year, the IAU has turned to crowd-sourcing names as a result of these two significant missions to the inner and outer solar system.
Messenger captured many craters on Mercury. Credit: MESSENGER Teams, JHU APL, NASA
What's in a name?
By the 20th century this messy and ad hoc system of naming celestial places was becoming a problem for astronomers. English astronomer Mary Adela Blagg began work on sorting out lunar nomenclature, and when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) was established in 1919, they appointed her to their first nomenclature
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These naming campaigns help make the Earth- bound feel included in space exploration. But encouraging participation and diversity is far more than an exercise in public engagement.
Richard A. Proctor’s early map of Mars, from Other Worlds than Ours. Credit: Wikimedia/Richard A. Proctor
To celebrate the end of Messenger's mission, NASA and the Messenger team decided to ask the public to name five craters on Mercury.
Since Mariner 10's flyby in 1973, Mercury's theme The first colour image ever made of the Pluto system by has been artists of all kinds: music, writing, visual a spacecraft, New Horizons, taken from 115 million km. arts and performance. The detail of the planet and moon system will become clearer as the craft gets closer. Credit: NASA/Johns There you'll find the Equiano crater, after Beninese Hopkins University Applied Physics writer, abolition campaigner and former slave Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute Olaudah Equiano; and the Sei Shonagon crater, honouring the 10th century Japanese courtier who pioneered the list as a literary form. Nominations are currently with the IAU, and the results should As historian Paul Carter says, in his book The Road be announced this month. to Botany Bay, spatial history begins:
The SETI Institute and the New Horizons team […] not in a particular year, not in a particular place, have coordinated a similar campaign. They came but in the act of naming. For by the act of place- up with an extensive list of names on Pluto's theme naming, space is transformed symbolically into a – exploration and the underworld – for the public to place, that is, a place with history. vote on. (And yes, Cthulhu is on the ballot, along with Sun Wukong, better known to us as Monkey). And, by the same token, the namer inscribes [their] passage permanently on the world, making a They're also accepting nominations for names not metaphorical word-place which others may one day on their list. Voting closes on April 24th and the inhabit […] resulting shortlist will be sent to the IAU for the final decision. Celestial geography mirrors the power relations of terrestrial politics. The long tradition of classical and
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European names reflected a world-view which privileged the Western over Indigenous, Eastern and global south cultures.
But through the IAU and crowd-sourcing projects such as these, the public has an opportunity to write new values onto planetary surfaces. Let's take it!
This story is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons- Attribution/No derivatives).
Source: The Conversation APA citation: Call to let the people decide new place names on Mercury and Pluto (2015, April 20) retrieved 29 September 2021 from https://phys.org/news/2015-04-people-mercury-pluto.html
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